My father turned seventy last month, and his happiness isn't about anything he has—it's about the long list of things he stopped needing somewhere in his fifties
My father turned seventy last month. He is, by any honest measure I can apply, one of the happiest men I know.
I want to be precise about what that means, because the word "happy" gets used loosely and I do not want to suggest he is, in some shallow sense, cheerful all the time. He is not cheerful all the time. He has bad days. He has small ongoing health concerns. He misses people who have died. He worries, in the quiet way men of his generation worry, about money and about the future and about the various uncertainties of being seventy in a world that has changed considerably since he was thirty.
What he has, underneath all of this, is something I find harder to name but easier to recognize when I am in a room with him. He has a particular kind of low-grade contentment that does not seem to depend on the day's events. He sleeps well. He laughs at small things. He is interested in the small details of his afternoon. He does not, as far as I can tell, spend much time wanting anything he does not have.
For a long time, in my twenties and early thirties, I assumed this contentment was about what he had. The marriage. The house. The pension. The children. The standard cultural framing suggested that happiness in late life was a function of accumulated assets, both material and relational, and my father, looking around at his life, seemed to be reasonably well-stocked on these. I attributed his happiness to the inventory.
The older I get, the more clearly I see that the inventory is not, on close examination, what is producing the contentment. The contentment is, much more accurately, a function of a long list of things he stopped needing somewhere in his fifties. The happiness is, in some real way, subtractive rather than additive. He is not happy because of what he has accumulated. He is happy because of what he has, over the years, put down.
The list, as I've been able to reconstruct it
I have been paying attention to this for the last few years, partly because I want to know what he did, and partly because I am thirty-eight and have, somewhere ahead of me, the chance to do something similar or not.
The list, as I have been able to reconstruct it, includes the following.
He stopped, somewhere in his fifties, needing other people to think of him in any particular way. This is the first and largest item on the list. For most of my early life, I watched him calibrate his behavior, in small ways, around the imagined assessments of various audiences. Colleagues. Neighbors. Extended family. His own father, who lived until my father was sixty-two. By his late fifties, the calibration had quietly stopped. He was no longer performing for an imagined gallery. He was no longer adjusting his tone to be more impressive, or his behavior to be more acceptable, or his preferences to be more presentable. He had, in some real way, accepted that the gallery's assessment was not, in the end, going to matter to him, and the acceptance had freed up an enormous amount of energy that had previously been going into the performance.
He stopped needing certain conversations to go in a particular way. He had, for most of his adult life, been a man who would push, in conversation, to make sure his point landed. By his sixties, he had stopped doing this. He would say what he thought. The other person would respond. If the response indicated that his point had not landed, he would, generally, let it lie. He did not seem to require the other person's agreement in order to feel that the conversation had been worth having. The conversation could be worth having simply because the two of them had been in a room together. The not-needing-the-other-person-to-agree was, I now think, one of the larger sources of his late-life calm.
He stopped needing the future to look like anything specific. For most of his working life, he had been a man with plans. The plans were not grandiose. They were the standard middle-class plans of his generation. The house paid off. The retirement. The trips. By his late fifties, the plans had mostly been executed or quietly retired. What he did not do, after they were done, was generate a new set of plans to replace them. He let the future, for the first time in his adult life, become something he was not actively engineering. The future, accordingly, became less of a source of low-grade anxiety. It was no longer a project. It was, more modestly, just whatever was going to happen.
He stopped needing the children to be a particular way. I include myself in this, and I want to acknowledge that the cessation was not, in any obvious sense, a verdict on me. He had, for most of my childhood and young adulthood, had a particular vision of what kind of man I would become. By the time I was about thirty-five, the vision had quietly been retired. He had accepted that I was the man I was. The man I was was different, in various ways, from the man he had imagined. He had stopped, somewhere along the way, requiring me to be the imagined one. The acceptance produced, between us, a relationship that was lighter and more honest than the relationship we had had when the vision was still active. It also produced, in him, a small ongoing relief that he no longer needed to monitor whether I was tracking against the imagined trajectory.
He stopped needing to be right about things he had been wrong about. This is, in my observation, one of the rarer items on the list, and one that distinguishes my father from a number of his peers. He had, in his fifties, simply allowed himself to update his views on a number of subjects without making a project of the updating. He did not announce the updates. He did not apologize for the previous positions. He just, over time, started talking about various subjects from a different vantage point, and the new vantage point became, by quiet accumulation, his current one. The not-needing-to-defend-the-previous-positions freed up energy that other men his age spend, in considerable quantities, on the maintenance of consistency.
He stopped needing to be useful to everyone who wanted his help. This is the item that took me longest to notice. For most of my early life, my father had been a man who said yes when asked. By his late fifties, he was saying no more often. Not unkindly. Not in any way that would have registered, to the asker, as a refusal. He would simply, with practiced gentleness, decline. The decline was rarely contested, because he was not declining in any combative way. He was just, quietly, no longer available for the volume of usefulness he had been delivering for thirty years. The energy released by this single shift was, by my estimate, substantial.
What is striking, about all of these
What is striking about all of these items, when I lay them out, is that none of them required my father to acquire anything. None of them involved a new skill, a new asset, a new relationship, or a new project. Each of them involved, more accurately, the cessation of something he had been doing.
The cessations were not, in most cases, dramatic. They were not announced. They did not, in any single instance, register as a major life event. They occurred slowly, in the small spaces between his ordinary days, across a stretch of about a decade. He himself, asked directly, would not be able to identify when most of them occurred. He would, I suspect, be slightly surprised by the list itself, if I showed it to him. He has not framed his own contentment in these terms. He has just, over the years, been the man who put these things down.
What he has gained, by putting them down, is hard to itemize, because the gain is, in some sense, the absence of the costs the items were producing. He is not happier than he used to be because he has acquired new sources of joy. He is happier because the various low-grade drains on his energy and attention have, one by one, been retired. The same temperament that, in his forties, was carrying a considerable load of performance, ambition, anxiety, and obligation is now, in his seventies, carrying considerably less. The temperament has not changed. The load has.
What I have started to consider, in my own life
I am thirty-eight. I am, by my own honest accounting, still carrying most of the items on my father's list, in some active form.
I still calibrate, in small daily ways, around the imagined assessments of various audiences. I still need certain conversations to go in particular ways. I still have, somewhere in my head, a model of what the future is supposed to look like, and I still expend ongoing energy on the project of engineering it. I still, in various small ways, need to be right about things I have been wrong about. I still say yes more often than I should.
The thirty-year project of becoming the kind of man my father is at seventy is, on examination, not a project of acquiring anything. It is, more accurately, a project of slowly putting things down. The putting-down is, in some real way, the more difficult kind of work, because there is no clear external metric for whether it is happening. Nobody is going to congratulate me for needing other people's opinions less. Nobody is going to throw a party when I stop requiring particular conversations to go particular ways. The work is invisible. The work is also, on the basis of what I have observed in my father, the most consequential work available in the second half of life.
I have started, in small ways, attempting some of it. I notice, more often than I used to, when I am calibrating around an imagined audience, and I have, on some occasions, declined to calibrate. I notice, in conversations, when I am pushing to make my point land, and I have, sometimes, let the point lie. I notice, in my own ongoing planning of the future, when the planning is producing anxiety, and I have, occasionally, allowed myself to plan less. The cessations are small. They do not, in any single instance, feel like much. They are, on the basis of what I have observed in my father, where the work actually is.
The recognition I would offer to my father, if I knew how to say it
If I had the equipment to say it to him directly, which I mostly do not, what I would want my father to know is that his contentment, which he has never described to me in any explicit terms, is the most useful thing I have inherited from him. Not the practical inheritances. Not the lessons. The demonstrated example of a man who has, slowly and without announcement, put down a long series of things he no longer needed, and who has produced, by the putting-down, a version of himself that is, in his seventies, more at peace than most men a fraction of his age.
The example is not, in any externally measurable way, an example of achievement. He has not, by my generation's metrics, accomplished anything in his late life that registers as significant. He has, on close examination, achieved something much harder than what my generation measures. He has achieved a particular kind of structural lightness, which most men of his age and demographic do not achieve, and which is, on the basis of everything I can observe, the actual condition that contentment requires.
The lightness is what I want, eventually, to have. The lightness is, on examination, available. The lightness is not something I can acquire. It is something I can, over the next thirty years, slowly construct, by putting down, one by one, the items that are currently producing the weight.
My father turned seventy last month. The party was small. He smiled at most of it without doing anything in particular to produce the smile. I have, since, been thinking about how he got there. The list above is what I have, so far. I suspect the list is longer than what I have written down. I suspect I will, in my forties and fifties, find out what the rest of it is, mostly by the slow process of figuring out what to put down next.
For now, the items I have identified are enough to be going on with. Most of my work, for the foreseeable future, will be in attempting to put down even one of them with the quiet competence my father, somehow, managed.
